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Salaries of Samsung Electronics execs tumble

August 18, 2015

Samsung’s Shin Jong-kyun saw his salary go from $9.5 million to $1.4 million due to slimping smartphone sales. (Yonhap)

SEOUL (Yonhap) — The salaries of major executives at tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. plunged in the first half of the year, data showed Tuesday, amid a slump in sales of its smartphone business.

Shin Jong-kyun, head of the handset maker’s mobile division, was paid 1.64 billion won (US$1.38 million) in the first six months of the year, down 85.5 percent from the 11.3 billion won he received a year earlier, according to the data compiled by market tracker Chaebul.com.

Kwon Oh-hyun, the head of Samsung’s semiconductor business, earned 2.95 billion won, the highest among Samsung executives, but the figure was down sharply from the 5.4 billion won he received in the previous year.

The head of the consumer electronics division, Yoon Boo-keun, made 1.65 billion won in the six-month period, down 43.1 percent from last year’s 2.9 billion won, the data showed.

The decline in the salaries of Samsung executives came in the wake of the company’s overall earnings slump.

Samsung posted a near 8 percent fall in its net profit for the second quarter amid lackluster results in its flagship smartphone business.

Among other business executives at 2,304 local firms studied by Chaebul.com, Chung Mong-koo, the chairman of Hyundai Motor Group, came in at fourth place with 4.2 billion won, while Cho Yang-ho, chairman of Hanjin Group, ranked sixth with 3.89 billion won.

Shin Dong-bin, the chairman of Lotte Holdings, earned 2.25 billion won in the same period was 16th, whereas his older brother, Dong-joo, his rival in an ongoing ownership feud over the retail giant Lotte Group, was 41st with 14.88 billion won, the data showed.

The salaries of Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee and his son, Lee Jae-yong, are usually not made public as they don’t sit on the company’s board of directors.

Overall, the number of corporate executives who earned more than 500 million won in the January-June period came to 227, up 35 from the number tallied a year earlier, with Yu Kyung-sun, head of Eugene Group, receiving the highest salary of 15.4 billion won, according to Chaebul.com.